Donald Trump warned that he would order the Navy to open fire on Iranian boats that provoke American ships, days after a high-seas incident that ended peacefully.

When the GOP presidential nominee laid out his plan to modernize the military during a Friday night rally in Pensacola, Fla., he took an off-script aside to address his posture toward Iran.

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"With Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water," Trump said to loud cheers.

Rally-goers could be heard shouting "shoot them" as Trump wound up.

This week, the Pentagon said seven Iranian attack boats harassed an American destroyer in the Persian Gulf.

Trump has taken a tough posture on Iran from the beginning of his campaign, slamming the Iran deal as a failure and blasting America's response to a January incident when Iran briefly detained American sailors who accidentally crossed into Iranian waters.

But he wouldn't go as far when discussing another international incident where a Russian fighter flew at a U.S. surveillance airplane.

"Putin laughs, believe me, he laughs at our leaders and takes us to the cleaners again and again," he said. "Yesterday, we had a plane, he had jets circling the plane. They were as close as 10 feet away — taunting us, toying with us — just like Iran."

Trump said earlier in the speech he would try to work with the Russians on fighting terrorism and batted down criticism of too-friendly relation between him and Vladimir Putin.

By 2013, she was saying: “I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples” personally and as a matter of policy. But in a 2014 interview with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air, she denied having changed her stance and suggested that Gross was trying to twist her words.

2. The Iraq War.

In 2002, explaining her vote for invading Iraq, Clinton said: “It is clear… that if left unchecked Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage chemical and biological warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons …This is probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. Any vote that might lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with conviction.” On Meet the Press in 2008, Clinton defended her vote authorizing the war, telling the late Tim Russert: “it is absolutely unfair to say that the vote as [former Senator and Defense Secretary] Chuck Hagel, who was one of the architects of the resolution, has said, was a vote for war. It was a vote to use the threat of force against Saddam Hussein, who never did anything without being made to do so.”

Last May, she changed her tune about the vote, saying: “I made it very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple. And I have written about it in my book.”

3. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

As secretary of state under President Obama, Clinton backed this ambitious 12-nation trade agreement, which was never concluded and is now in jeopardy. But Sanders – and Republican nominee Donald Trump – have denounced trade deals such as TPP as detrimental to American workers. Now Clinton opposes TPP, which she once called the “gold standard” of trade deals.

4. North American Free Trade Agreement.

As first lady, Clinton was credited with helping her husband, President Bill Clinton, secure passage of NAFTA, a major trade deal that has since been criticized as a killer of U.S. manufacturing jobs. As a senator in 2004, she said: “I think on balance, NAFTA has been good for New York and America.” In her unsuccessful primary battle against then Senator Barack Obama in 2008, she said she was one of the voices within Bill Clinton’s administration “warning about NAFTA.”

5. The Keystone Pipeline.

In 2010, Secretary of State Clinton said the administration was “inclined” to support the building of the controversial pipeline, which would transport heavy crude oil from Canada to the U.S. She now flat-out opposes Keystone, saying “I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone.” PolitiFacts calls that a “No Flip,” but others see it as a decision based on which way the political windsock was blowing.

6. Criminal Justice.

In 1996, Hillary Clinton spoke in New Hampshire in support of a law signed by Bill Clinton, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which has since been blamed in part for America having the highest mass incarceration rate in the world. She said: "We also have to have an organized effort against gangs. Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on …They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel." Clinton has been criticized by Bernie Sanders and most recently Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus for calling African-American youths “super predators.” Though she didn’t make a direct connection, Sanders said, “it was a racist term, and everyone knew it was a racist term.” Clinton has said she regrets using those words. Her website now says: “This mass incarceration epidemic has an explicit racial bias, as one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. A significant number of those incarcerated are held for low-level, nonviolent offenses. We must end the era of mass incarceration.”

7. Illegal Immigrant Children.

In 2014, Clinton discussed the influx of children from Central America illegally crossing into the U.S. with Christiane Amanpour of CNN. She said: “We have to send a clear message that just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean your child gets to stay.” But in an MSNBC/Telemondo Town Hall in February, Jose Diaz-Balart asked if those children should be treated like a message. “Well,” Clinton said, “the children themselves need to be taken care of. They are children. They should be given every help that we can.”

Morell was a top official throughout the period of CIA kidnappings (renditions) of victims who were then held in secret prisons and tortured. He helped lead the CIA when it was carrying out drone missile assassinations and other forms of covert state terrorism. Throughout his tenure in Langley, Virginia, the CIA was engaged in war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and many other countries.

After Morell left the agency, Obama appointed him to the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which prepared a whitewash of National Security Agency spying following the revelations by Edward Snowden. He then moved seamlessly to a position as a well-paid media commentator for CBS News, while joining the campaign of former CIA officials to block the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.

That such an individual comes out publicly in support of Hillary Clinton says a great deal about the nature of the Democratic presidential campaign and the type of administration Clinton will head in the event that she wins the November election.

Morell’s op-ed column appears under the headline: “I Ran the CIA. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.” As far as the New York Times is concerned, support for Clinton from an organization that is identified around the world with torture and murder should be shouted from the rooftops. It is something to be proud of, a positive credential for the Democratic presidential nominee.

The former CIA official declares Clinton “highly qualified to be commander in chief,” praises “her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead in the world,” and notes that in the internal discussions over US intervention in the Syrian civil war, “she was a strong proponent of a more aggressive approach.”

Morell denounces Trump as unqualified to be president, in part because of his volatile personality and lack of national security experience, but mainly because of his supposed connection to Russia.

He writes:

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated…

“Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests—endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States. In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

This extraordinary allegation adds fuel to the campaign launched by pro-Clinton pundits like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, portraying Trump as a “Siberian candidate” whose campaign represents a Russian intervention into the US elections.

The Clinton campaign has embraced and promoted these McCarthyite smears, issuing a video Friday posing the question, “What is Donald Trump’s connection to Vladimir Putin?” The video, available on YouTube, consists of clips of right-wing media figures, including Joe Scarborough, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, denouncing Trump for his praise for Putin, interspersed with questions suggesting that Trump has secret business ties to Russia and is being financed by Russian oligarchs.

In style and political content, the video recalls the ravings of the John Birch Society, the anticommunist organization of the 1950s and 1960s that claimed leading US political figures, including President Eisenhower, were Soviet agents.

This underscores the drastic shift to the right in the political orientation of the Democratic Party. It does not oppose Trump on the basis of his militarism or his authoritarian contempt for democratic rights. Instead, the Clinton campaign is presenting itself as the authoritative party of the military-intelligence complex and the political establishment, appealing to billionaires, the military brass and the intelligence agencies.

In the form of Trump vs. Clinton, the US electoral system has provided working people the “choice” between an openly fascistic demagogue and an avowed representative of the Pentagon, the CIA and the financial establishment hell-bent on launching new imperialist wars.

The barrage of claims by the corporate media that Trump, as distinct from “normal” US politicians, is deranged deserves only contempt. Both Trump and Clinton are deadly enemies of the working class. They may be opposed to one another in the election campaign, but that is no argument for working people to take sides. Rather, workers and youth must draw the conclusion that the entire political system is deeply dysfunctional and should be swept away.

The Democratic Party is appealing, not to the mass opposition and disgust with Trump on the part of working people, but to the opposition to Trump within the US ruling elite, whose main concern is that the Republican candidate’s friendly gestures towards Putin, his open questioning of the value of NATO, and his expressed reservations about US wars in the Middle East are cutting across the bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Washington.

This poses immense dangers to the working class. The logic of the Democrats’ anti-Trump campaign is to channel mass opposition to Trump behind preparations for war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power. In the event of a Democratic victory—increasingly likely according to polling this week—Clinton will claim a mandate for war policies that can be carried out only through a frontal assault on the living standards and democratic rights of American workers. This demonstrates that the differences between Clinton and Trump are purely tactical: how best to subordinate the working class to the war drive of American imperialism.

As the World Socialist Web Site has previously pointed out, Trump did not crawl out of the Manhattan sewers or a Munich beer hall. He emerged from the well-heeled, corrupt circle of real estate speculators in New York City, where he had the closest ties with the Democratic Party machine. He was molded and promoted for decades by the corporate-controlled media and the political establishment. He and the Clintons are old friends: he invited them to one of his weddings; they asked for his money for their political campaigns and bogus charities.

If Trump is suddenly branded as a monster who must be kept out of the White House, it is only because the US financial aristocracy and the military-intelligence apparatus have a different monster in mind, one they consider more dependable: Hillary Clinton. She’s the monster who is on message—on Ukraine, Russia, NATO and the anti-Chinese “pivot to Asia.” She knows which generals to salute and which billionaires to flatter. She’s a “safe pair of hands,” which means she can be relied on to kill the right people.

That is the meaning of Clinton’s endorsement by the CIA’s Michael Morell and, more generally, the wave of support for her campaign from billionaires, Republicans, generals and the media

Donald Trump warned that he would order the Navy to open fire on Iranian boats that provoke American ships, days after a high-seas incident that ended peacefully.

When the GOP presidential nominee laid out his plan to modernize the military during a Friday night rally in Pensacola, Fla., he took an off-script aside to address his posture toward Iran.

ADVERTISEMENT

"With Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water," Trump said to loud cheers.

Rally-goers could be heard shouting "shoot them" as Trump wound up.

This week, the Pentagon said seven Iranian attack boats harassed an American destroyer in the Persian Gulf.

Trump has taken a tough posture on Iran from the beginning of his campaign, slamming the Iran deal as a failure and blasting America's response to a January incident when Iran briefly detained American sailors who accidentally crossed into Iranian waters.

But he wouldn't go as far when discussing another international incident where a Russian fighter flew at a U.S. surveillance airplane.

"Putin laughs, believe me, he laughs at our leaders and takes us to the cleaners again and again," he said. "Yesterday, we had a plane, he had jets circling the plane. They were as close as 10 feet away — taunting us, toying with us — just like Iran."

Trump said earlier in the speech he would try to work with the Russians on fighting terrorism and batted down criticism of too-friendly relation between him and Vladimir Putin.

Opinions and policy positions evolve as people age and learn, but voters can be unforgiving of politicians who radically change their stances. In the 2016 election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton seems to have switched at least one position after coming under pressure from progressive supporters of primary challenger Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. In other instances she has moved to a different place on her own or just backpedaled in the face of vocal opposition.

Here are seven of Clinton’s biggest flip-flops:

1. Gay Marriage.

For almost a decade and as late as 2010, Clinton opposed gay marriage but backed civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, as this video makes clear. In 2002, Clinton was asked by Chris Matthews of MSNBC, “Do you think New York State should recognize gay marriage?” Clinton’s answer: “No.” In 2004, as New York senator, she said: “I believe that marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.”

By 2013, she was saying: “I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples” personally and as a matter of policy. But in a 2014 interview with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air, she denied having changed her stance and suggested that Gross was trying to twist her words.

2. The Iraq War.

In 2002, explaining her vote for invading Iraq, Clinton said: “It is clear… that if left unchecked Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage chemical and biological warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons …This is probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. Any vote that might lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with conviction.” On Meet the Press in 2008, Clinton defended her vote authorizing the war, telling the late Tim Russert: “it is absolutely unfair to say that the vote as [former Senator and Defense Secretary] Chuck Hagel, who was one of the architects of the resolution, has said, was a vote for war. It was a vote to use the threat of force against Saddam Hussein, who never did anything without being made to do so.”

Last May, she changed her tune about the vote, saying: “I made it very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple. And I have written about it in my book.”

3. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

As secretary of state under President Obama, Clinton backed this ambitious 12-nation trade agreement, which was never concluded and is now in jeopardy. But Sanders – and Republican nominee Donald Trump – have denounced trade deals such as TPP as detrimental to American workers. Now Clinton opposes TPP, which she once called the “gold standard” of trade deals.

4. North American Free Trade Agreement.

As first lady, Clinton was credited with helping her husband, President Bill Clinton, secure passage of NAFTA, a major trade deal that has since been criticized as a killer of U.S. manufacturing jobs. As a senator in 2004, she said: “I think on balance, NAFTA has been good for New York and America.” In her unsuccessful primary battle against then Senator Barack Obama in 2008, she said she was one of the voices within Bill Clinton’s administration “warning about NAFTA.”

In 2010, Secretary of State Clinton said the administration was “inclined” to support the building of the controversial pipeline, which would transport heavy crude oil from Canada to the U.S. She now flat-out opposes Keystone, saying “I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone.” PolitiFacts calls that a “No Flip,” but others see it as a decision based on which way the political windsock was blowing.

6. Criminal Justice.

In 1996, Hillary Clinton spoke in New Hampshire in support of a law signed by Bill Clinton, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which has since been blamed in part for America having the highest mass incarceration rate in the world. She said: "We also have to have an organized effort against gangs. Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on …They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators — no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel." Clinton has been criticized by Bernie Sanders and most recently Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus for calling African-American youths “super predators.” Though she didn’t make a direct connection, Sanders said, “it was a racist term, and everyone knew it was a racist term.” Clinton has said she regrets using those words. Her website now says: “This mass incarceration epidemic has an explicit racial bias, as one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. A significant number of those incarcerated are held for low-level, nonviolent offenses. We must end the era of mass incarceration.”

7. Illegal Immigrant Children.

In 2014, Clinton discussed the influx of children from Central America illegally crossing into the U.S. with Christiane Amanpour of CNN. She said: “We have to send a clear message that just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean your child gets to stay.” But in an MSNBC/Telemondo Town Hall in February, Jose Diaz-Balart asked if those children should be treated like a message. “Well,” Clinton said, “the children themselves need to be taken care of. They are children. They should be given every help that we can.”

In an op-ed column in Friday’s New York Times, former top CIA official Michael Morell publicly endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. In the article, Morell branded Clinton’s Republican opponent, Donald Trump, as a pawn of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Morell retired from the CIA in 2013 after a 33-year career, having spent two decades in high-level positions in Washington. His duties included preparing the President’s Daily Brief for George W. Bush. For three years he was deputy director, running the agency day-to-day, and he had two stints as acting director, for three months in 2011 and for four months in 2012-2013.

Morell was a top official throughout the period of CIA kidnappings (renditions) of victims who were then held in secret prisons and tortured. He helped lead the CIA when it was carrying out drone missile assassinations and other forms of covert state terrorism. Throughout his tenure in Langley, Virginia, the CIA was engaged in war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and many other countries.

After Morell left the agency, Obama appointed him to the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which prepared a whitewash of National Security Agency spying following the revelations by Edward Snowden. He then moved seamlessly to a position as a well-paid media commentator for CBS News, while joining the campaign of former CIA officials to block the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.

That such an individual comes out publicly in support of Hillary Clinton says a great deal about the nature of the Democratic presidential campaign and the type of administration Clinton will head in the event that she wins the November election.

Morell’s op-ed column appears under the headline: “I Ran the CIA. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.” As far as the New York Times is concerned, support for Clinton from an organization that is identified around the world with torture and murder should be shouted from the rooftops. It is something to be proud of, a positive credential for the Democratic presidential nominee.

The former CIA official declares Clinton “highly qualified to be commander in chief,” praises “her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead in the world,” and notes that in the internal discussions over US intervention in the Syrian civil war, “she was a strong proponent of a more aggressive approach.”

Morell denounces Trump as unqualified to be president, in part because of his volatile personality and lack of national security experience, but mainly because of his supposed connection to Russia.

He writes:

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated…

“Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests—endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States. In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

This extraordinary allegation adds fuel to the campaign launched by pro-Clinton pundits like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, portraying Trump as a “Siberian candidate” whose campaign represents a Russian intervention into the US elections.

The Clinton campaign has embraced and promoted these McCarthyite smears, issuing a video Friday posing the question, “What is Donald Trump’s connection to Vladimir Putin?” The video, available on YouTube, consists of clips of right-wing media figures, including Joe Scarborough, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, denouncing Trump for his praise for Putin, interspersed with questions suggesting that Trump has secret business ties to Russia and is being financed by Russian oligarchs.

In style and political content, the video recalls the ravings of the John Birch Society, the anticommunist organization of the 1950s and 1960s that claimed leading US political figures, including President Eisenhower, were Soviet agents.

This underscores the drastic shift to the right in the political orientation of the Democratic Party. It does not oppose Trump on the basis of his militarism or his authoritarian contempt for democratic rights. Instead, the Clinton campaign is presenting itself as the authoritative party of the military-intelligence complex and the political establishment, appealing to billionaires, the military brass and the intelligence agencies.

In the form of Trump vs. Clinton, the US electoral system has provided working people the “choice” between an openly fascistic demagogue and an avowed representative of the Pentagon, the CIA and the financial establishment hell-bent on launching new imperialist wars.

The barrage of claims by the corporate media that Trump, as distinct from “normal” US politicians, is deranged deserves only contempt. Both Trump and Clinton are deadly enemies of the working class. They may be opposed to one another in the election campaign, but that is no argument for working people to take sides. Rather, workers and youth must draw the conclusion that the entire political system is deeply dysfunctional and should be swept away.

The Democratic Party is appealing, not to the mass opposition and disgust with Trump on the part of working people, but to the opposition to Trump within the US ruling elite, whose main concern is that the Republican candidate’s friendly gestures towards Putin, his open questioning of the value of NATO, and his expressed reservations about US wars in the Middle East are cutting across the bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Washington.

This poses immense dangers to the working class. The logic of the Democrats’ anti-Trump campaign is to channel mass opposition to Trump behind preparations for war with Russia, a nuclear-armed power. In the event of a Democratic victory—increasingly likely according to polling this week—Clinton will claim a mandate for war policies that can be carried out only through a frontal assault on the living standards and democratic rights of American workers. This demonstrates that the differences between Clinton and Trump are purely tactical: how best to subordinate the working class to the war drive of American imperialism.

As the World Socialist Web Site has previously pointed out, Trump did not crawl out of the Manhattan sewers or a Munich beer hall. He emerged from the well-heeled, corrupt circle of real estate speculators in New York City, where he had the closest ties with the Democratic Party machine. He was molded and promoted for decades by the corporate-controlled media and the political establishment. He and the Clintons are old friends: he invited them to one of his weddings; they asked for his money for their political campaigns and bogus charities.

If Trump is suddenly branded as a monster who must be kept out of the White House, it is only because the US financial aristocracy and the military-intelligence apparatus have a different monster in mind, one they consider more dependable: Hillary Clinton. She’s the monster who is on message—on Ukraine, Russia, NATO and the anti-Chinese “pivot to Asia.” She knows which generals to salute and which billionaires to flatter. She’s a “safe pair of hands,” which means she can be relied on to kill the right people.

That is the meaning of Clinton’s endorsement by the CIA’s Michael Morell and, more generally, the wave of support for her campaign from billionaires, Republicans, generals and the media

Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in West Virginia's Democratic primary Tuesday, while Donald Trump, with no remaining challengers, claimed an easy victory there and in Nebraska among Republicans.

At a rally in Salem, Ore., following his win, Sanders, a Vermont senator, told supporters “it appears that we won a big, big victory in West Virginia.”

“West Virginia is a working-class state, and like many other states in this country, including Oregon, working people are hurting,” he said. “And what the people of West Virginia said tonight, and I believe the people of Oregon and Kentucky will say next week, is that we need an economy that works for all of us, not just the one percent.”

Hillary Clinton is looking confidently ahead to the general election, but taking nothing for granted as California's mega-primary approaches, reaching out to Hispanic and black voters in the hope of waging a final knockout against rival Bernie Sanders.

Clinton's visit to the Golden State Thursday coincides with Cinco de Mayo, the annual celebration of Mexican culture and heritage. She plans to rally supporters in the gymnasium of a community college that serves heavily Hispanic cities on the edge of Los Angeles.

Trailing significantly in the Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders wants superdelegates to flip his way and is aiming for a contested national convention in July against front-runner Hillary Clinton. For his plan to work, he'll need plenty of big-time breaks.

Sanders says he will campaign until the final primary in the District of Columbia in mid-June and aim to amass as many delegates as possible to influence the platform at the party's convention in Philadelphia.

Donald Trump looks to sweep five northeastern states Tuesday while preparing for a revamped Republican race against an extraordinary alliance between rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich designed to stop him at the July convention.

Denouncing plans by Cruz and Kasich to avoid each other in three upcoming states, Trump said that "this horrible act of desperation from two campaigns who have totally failed" makes him even more determined to win the Republican presidential nomination